


i want a word for the almost-home

by andibeth82



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Comfort/Angst, F/M, Fluff and Crack, Gen, Implied Bisexual Steve Rogers, Las Vegas, OT3, Sexual Tension, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-07 13:33:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3175002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/pseuds/andibeth82
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You married Barton?”</p><p>“Oh.” Clint sits down next to Natasha and holds up a hand curiously, watching the silver ring glint in the overhead light. He grins. “So that’s what happened in Vegas.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	i want a word for the almost-home

**Author's Note:**

> So, uh. I guess this thing happened where a twitter conversation got out of hand between myself, [intrikate88](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88) and [hjea](hjea.tumblr.com) when we were talking about the secret!married trope, and then I opened my big mouth with the following: 
> 
> _“Dreaming of my college!punk AU: Clint/Nat sneaking off to Vegas and getting secretly married during break. Steve’s their BFF and Nat’s on again/off again boyfriend and he finds out randomly at a bar or something.”_  
>     
> And then I wrote the opening lines as a joke, and now we're here. I’m not exactly sure what happened to this story -- it’s probably a little more cracky than I originally intended it to be -- but I’ve been writing so much heavy stuff lately, I sort of needed to tackle something a little lighter.
> 
> As a note, nothing in this fic is overly explicit, and there are a lot of things that are more implied than anything else. Thanks to [geckoholic](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic) and [bobsessive](bobsessive.tumblr.com) for beta and encouragement and for listening to me whine.

“You did WHAT?”

“Got you a beer, dumbass,” Natasha says as she slides into the booth and shoves a glass across the table. Steve shakes his head.

“No, not that. You married Barton?”

“Oh.” Clint sits down next to Natasha and holds up a hand curiously, watching the silver ring glint in the overhead light. He grins. “So that’s what happened in Vegas.”

 

 

**Steve Rogers**

Steve Rogers meets Natasha Romanoff for the first time at a party.

He technically meets her for the first time at the campus bookstore, but she’s Natalie then, explaining to him that for some reason the workers find it easier to write that down when they’re reserving things for her, rather than her given name. It’s a nice excuse, but for some reason, Steve doesn’t buy it.

“So why don’t you just use ‘Nat?’”

Natasha gives him a look. “You talk too much.”

“I asked you a question,” Steve protests, following her out of the student center. Natasha turns around, pinning him with her gaze, and although there’s a lot more he thinks he could be looking at, Steve finds himself latching onto the eyebrow piercing on the left side of her face.

“And I gave you an answer. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for class.”

Natasha doesn’t go to class. Instead, she ends up across campus, crouched behind an abandoned building, chain-smoking with a sandy-haired kid that looks about sixteen and definitely not old enough to drink. Steve finds this out by accident when he happens to take the wrong route back to his dorm but he never tells her, not until they bump into each other at a party that he’s been forced to attend by his roommate, and that she’s attended only because she happened to live in the upstairs portion of the house that's being used to host the event.

“Hi,” he says in surprise, feeling his forehead crinkle. She stares at him from underneath a fringe of heavy red bangs.

“Hi.” She sounds just as surprised, or maybe he’s just imagining it, because her voice definitely doesn’t match up with her face, which is determined and confident.

“Natalie, right?” he asks easily, and she shoots him a scathing glare.

“Natasha. What are you doing here?”

“Uh, it’s a party?” Steve asks, thoroughly confused. “I was invited, same as you.”

“I wasn’t invited,” Natasha says airily, grabbing an abandoned beer from the nearby table. Steve hesitates and stops the words on his tongue; the ones that mean to warn her that maybe she should be more careful drinking out of unmarked cups. Natasha tilts her head.

“You worried about me?”

“What?” Steve blinks, and Natasha’s lips dance upwards.

“You were going to say something.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Steve protests a little lamely, and Natasha laughs.

“Yes, you were. Come on, out with it. What the hell were you gonna say that you didn’t think I wanted to hear?”

Steve sighs in frustration, dragging a hand through his hair. “I was gonna tell you to be careful with that drink,” he says finally. “Someone might’ve spiked it.”

Natasha purses her lips. “Oh.” She looks little curious and then takes a small sip, putting the cup down carefully. “So I guess I shouldn’t disobey you, then. Wouldn’t want to upset a national hero.”

“National –” Steve stops, guffawing slightly. “I’m not a national hero, Natasha.”

“Oh, no?” Her lips continue to stretch across her face. “Weren’t you the man behind our mascot suit last year? The one and only Captain America?”

Steve feels himself pale considerably, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Pretty astute for someone who doesn’t go to class and spends all their time goofing off behind the science center,” he retorts with about as much gusto as he can manage, and there’s a twitch in her shoulders, a tell that shows him his words have caught her off guard, though Natasha doesn’t react visibly.

“Why go to class when they don’t teach you anything about the real world, anyway?”

Steve shrugs. “Because we’re here to get an education. At least, I am.”

“Oh, please,” Natasha groans, stepping into his space. “You want an education? Because I can give you an education right now.”

“I, uh,” Steve stumbles backwards slightly, almost knocking over a keg. “You’re not a teacher.”

“Exactly. I’ll teach you things you _don’t_ need a degree for,” she says, wrapping one hand around his waist. When she kisses him, he can taste danger on her breath and rebellion on her lips, but it’s a different kind of danger, not the kind that he usually feels when he walks home alone from class at night, more the kind that sends butterflies through his stomach and makes his brain feel fuzzy.

He ends up following her up the stairs to her room, slipping into the dark when no one is looking, and all Steve can think is how grateful he is that he decided to stick a condom in his back pocket before he left.

“Do you take home all the guys you meet at parties?” Steve asks as she strips off her shirt in front of him and Natasha laughs, pushing him down onto the bed with two firm hands.

“Not particularly. But you’ll do.”

 

***

 

The sex is okay (who is he kidding, the sex is _great_ , it’s the best damn sex he’s ever had in his life) and he ends up spending the night, and Natasha doesn’t even kick him out the next morning, not until she realizes she has to meet a professor during office hours.

“Be back,” she singsongs, flipping her dark red hair into a long ponytail, and he can see the colorful outline of her shoulder tattoo peeking out from beneath the fabric of her thin sweatshirt. “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”

“How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you,” he responds without even thinking about it, and he immediately feels embarrassed because it sounds childish, it’s what him and Bucky used to say to each other in high school before they went off with a girl or a gang or a trip. But Natasha turns and smiles, placing a finger over her lips before flouncing out the door and down the stairs.

And Steve doesn’t ask to become Natasha’s boyfriend, and he doesn’t ask her to keep coming over, and he certainly doesn’t ask her for sex.

It just sort of happens.

 

***

 

Natasha’s not Steve’s first girlfriend, and Natasha’s not even Steve’s first relationship, and one day Steve will probably tell her there was that time in high school that he ended up in his best friend’s bed but right now, Steve’s enjoying college, and he’s enjoying getting to know Natasha. Because it’s true that Natasha is what you see on the surface, all rough edges and things like piercings and cigarettes and foul language and hipster clothing and large tattoos. But Natasha is also quiet and funny and gentle, and she’s never overzealous when they have sex and she’s always careful to make sure he’s comfortable with anything they do. She’s flirty and a little girly when she allows herself to be, and she has a wickedly dark sense of humor that he only realizes when she makes a joke about killing someone who is walking too slowly in front of them.

Still, Steve can’t figure out why him, why _him_ and why not the guy who seems to be her better half and her best friend, the guy that looks like her in terms of roughness and acts like her in terms of being more subdued under the surface.

“I just…don’t you get along with him much better?” Steve asks one day during a coffee run, and Natasha swings their hands.

“Who?”

“You know, the kid with the floppy hair, who wears the purple sneakers. I always see you guys together when you’re not with me, anyway.”

“Oh, Clint.” Natasha laughs then, and composes herself with a shrug. “Yeah, Clint’s great. We met the first day of school, the only two kids who couldn’t give a fuck about who our teachers were. And then he showed me all his tattoos that he got when he worked with the circus, and we’ve been friends ever since.”

“But you’re with me,” Steve says slowly, because she hasn’t quite answered his question, and Natasha looks confused, like she doesn’t understand what he’s saying.

“Yes. I am.” She stops their gait and leans up to kiss him, abruptly ending the conversation.

 

***

 

Their first fight comes about three months after they start dating, after they’ve decided they’re a “thing,” whatever being a “thing” means because sometimes Steve’s not even sure. Bucky had said they were a “thing” once, and so had the girl at the grocery store who worked with him on the days when she wasn’t going to summer school, but Natasha is more than both of them ever were and he thinks maybe they should be something more.

“It means we’re a _thing_ ,” Natasha had said impatiently when he had asked if it meant that they were doing more than dating. “We talk, we fuck, we enjoy each other’s company. That’s a thing. Clint and I are a thing. Me, you and Clint are a thing.”

Steve spits half of his beer across the table at that last sentence, because sure, he’s traded a few words with Clint on occasion, mostly because he’s been trying to learn about other people in Natasha’s life. But he’s never really gotten to _know_ him, and certainly not in the way that Natasha is inferring.

“Oh, I didn’t mean a threesome,” Natasha says airily, as if she can read his mind, throwing a napkin in his direction. “Unless you ever wanted to, I’m sure he’d be up for that. I just meant, we’re all a thing. We do stuff together that other people don’t.”

And that’s basically how Steve finds out that in addition to him, she’s also fucking the Barton kid. And he should be angrier, he thinks, but he’s not as upset about it as he could be -- just confused, because the more time goes on the more he realizes that Natasha is the type of person who he wants to fuck but also the type of person he wants to be friends with and, well, he hasn’t figured out which one he wants more but thinks he might be okay if it all ended with the latter.

Still, it doesn’t stop him from leaving her alone at the bar, and then avoiding her phone calls for three days.

 

***

 

“You’re being dumb,” Bucky tells him over Skype while shoving a spoonful of Cheerios into his mouth with one hand. “Have you even tried talking to her since you ran out of the bar like an embarrassment?”

“Not really,” Steve admits, shoving his elbows onto the desk, over a pile of papers. Bucky rolls his eyes.

“So she’s with someone else. So what? She obviously still likes you.” Bucky pauses. “I mean, look, I was dating that girl from art class and I still liked you, and you didn’t get mad at _me_ when I told you we slept together after prom.”

"That was one night!"

"And we spent the next night in my sister's spare bedroom. What's your point?"

Steve groans, rubbing his eyes. “Eat your goddamn breakfast,” he mutters before he snaps his laptop shut on Bucky’s too-wide grin.

 

***

 

Natasha calls him incessantly before she doesn’t anymore, and Steve knows that if given the chance she would apologize for what she had said. But the thing is, Steve doesn’t want an apology. He doesn’t need an apology. He _does_ want answers though, real answers, actual answers that aren’t just brushed off words, and so he corners Natasha as she’s leaving her house one morning, waiting at the end of the steps so that he’s the first thing she sees when she opens the door.

“Fuck you,” she spits out when their eyes meet and he holds up his hands.

“I wanna talk.”

“You wanna talk _now_?” She glares. “I’m not doing this outside. Come in.”

“You have class,” he protests as he follows her back up the stairs, and she shuts the door behind him.

“Since when have I ever given a fuck about going to class?” She shoves him down in a chair. “Talk.”

Steve opens his mouth to speak but she sits on his lap and starts kissing him before he can form words, and the next thing he knows, his hands are on her breasts and her fingers are undoing the zipper of his jeans and she’s got her hand down his pants and wrapped around his cock. And he knows that this is all sorts of wrong, but he goes along with it anyway, because she’s Natasha and he knows that she’s good and she’s real and she’ll give him what he wants.

The sex is quick and easy, and they’re both sweaty and wet with each other’s scent when they remove themselves from the chair. Natasha calmly picks up her discarded clothes, moving to the bathroom, the large serpent tattoo on her left shoulder dancing prominently against her skin.

“So are we still a thing?”

Natasha turns and tilts her head, as if she’s trying to figure out how to answer his question.

“Yeah. I guess we are.”

 

***

 

He doesn’t ask if she’s still seeing the Barton kid, and Natasha doesn’t tell him if she is or not, and Steve thinks that maybe if he can keep the whole “out of sight, out of mind” mentality about this whole thing, it’ll all be okay.

But he does decide to at least throw an olive branch to the guy, because it’s not his fault that Natasha can’t make up her mind when it comes to who she wants to sleep with, and so he invites Clint out to a bar with them on a Saturday night where they end up at a pool table while Steve buys them all rounds of beer. Natasha’s actually decently good when it comes to pool and it turns out that Clint’s even better, which makes for a pretty good competition considering all three of them end up being evenly matched.

“Where’d you learn your form?” Steve asks curiously as Clint expertly sends the 8 ball into a sleeve. Clint leans sideways on the table and grins, moving his fingers around the stick.

“Circus training. Did a stint there before coming to college, got some archery lessons while I was a it. But I was always good with my hands.”

“He’s still very good with his hands,” Natasha says pointedly as she sidles up next to Clint with another beer glass. “And he’s flexible, too.”

“Totally flexible,” Clint corroborates. As if to make a point, he shifts so that he’s leaning backwards, stretched over the length of the pool table’s rim, twisting his arms around so that the stick is positioned behind his head. Steve watches half in awe as he shoots a red ball across the table with the relative ease of an acrobat.

“Fucking hell, man.”

Natasha takes a long drink. “Tell him about those,” she says as Clint turns, pointing out what looks like a stretch of lines along the length of the inside of his forearm.

“Oh, yeah.” Clint sounds distracted, extending his wrist. “One arrow for each person in my life that’s meant something to me. The longer the arrow is, the more important they are.”

Steve leans over. “That one?” He squints, picking out a thicker line, following it down to where it meets a triangular arrowhead.

“My brother, Barney. I wanted a way to keep him with me when I went off to school.”

“Oh,” Steve says after a moment, because he had thought about getting a tattoo once, before college, him and Bucky had even gone so far as to map out their designs on pieces of scrap paper from Steve’s art class, but he had ultimately chickened out when he thought of the permanence of the whole thing. Clint seems to read his mind though, nodding towards him.

“Maybe you’ll get a tattoo one day.”

“Maybe,” Steve echoes, taking Natasha’s beer from her. “We’ll see.”

The lull in conversation sends everything into an awkward pause, which Natasha soon breaks by announcing that whoever wins gets the next round for free, and maybe a kiss, if they’re lucky. They stay at the bar until it’s nearly three in the morning and by the end of the night, Clint is jokingly calling Steve “Cap” to his face and Steve is drunk enough that he’s bummed a cigarette from Natasha’s stash and she’s sitting on his lap with her legs on top of Clint’s thighs while he leans on her knees, and sure, the situation is probably a little unorthodox but Steve is content enough not to care.

 

***

 

Their second fight comes a few months later, when Clint gets a dog.

And things have been going well up until that point, really, even though Steve suspects Natasha hasn’t been entirely mutually exclusive, but he’s also been spending more and more time with Clint, who he’s taken a liking to largely because of his good-will heart and affable attitude. And Clint’s not that much younger than Steve, maybe a few months at most, but he develops a slightly protective bond anyway, largely due to the fact that he hopes no one will ever do anything to take away how he looks at the world.

And then Clint gets a dog, and asks Natasha to watch it, and it somehow ends up in Steve’s bed.

“You could’ve told him no,” Steve complains, and Natasha shakes her head.

“No, I couldn’t. He let me cheat on his writing exam, so I owe him.”

“Fabulous,” Steve mutters while the dog stands up on top of the sheets and wags its tail furiously. “Why can’t you keep it at your house?”

“We don’t allow them in the house,” Natasha says matter-of-factly, scratching the yellow lab’s head. “Besides, I think it would be good for you to have a dog.”

“It’s _Clint’s_ dog,” Steve emphasizes, pulling on his shoes. “What’s his name again?”

“Lucky,” she supplies. “And don’t act so put out, it’s just for the weekend while he goes to visit his brother. You’ll get used to him…he’s cute.”

“And he’s sitting next to my naked girlfriend,” Steve points out as Natasha leans back, shrugging.

“You could just come back to bed,” she teases with a grin, pulling a pillow over her chest, and Steve frowns.

“I have to study,” he says shortly. Natasha sighs, sitting up and crossing her legs underneath her.

“What the hell is your problem?”

“My problem?” Steve feels absolutely dumbfounded. “ _You’re_ the one who invited Barton’s dog into my bed.”

“Oh, like you care,” Natasha says a little carelessly. “It’s a dog, Rogers, not another person. Come on. “ She extends her leg again, wiggling her toes. “You wanna fuck?”

“No,” Steve says again, this time a little more harshly, reaching for his pants as Natasha falls suddenly silent.

“Forget it,” she says after a long moment, getting out of bed herself. Steve sighs, watching as she tugs her clothes back on.

“Where are you going?”

Natasha pulls a shirt over her head. “Taking Lucky for a walk. If I’m going to spend the day somewhere, I’d like to be with someone that enjoys my company.” She slaps her knee gently and the dog bounds off the bed, snuggling into her side. Steve opens his mouth to speak again, though he doesn’t get a chance to actually respond, because Natasha grabs her messenger bag and flings open the door to the bedroom, stomping nosily down the stairs with Lucky on her heels.

“Don’t forget to write,” Steve calls bitterly and he thinks he hears Natasha laugh once before the front door slams. He stills his body, waiting an undetermined amount of minutes to see if she’s bluffing, if she’ll turn on her heel and come running back, but she doesn’t, and he ends up punching his pillow over and over again until the anger in him subsides.

 

***

 

The result of their fight is their first “real” break-up, as much as any break-up can be real given the circumstances of their relationship, and when Steve talks about it to people like Bucky he feels entirely stupid because it’s a _dog_ , it’s a damn dog of all things that’s the cause of it. He notices Natasha doesn’t call this time, and doesn’t really bother to let himself dwell on that until it’s past the weekend and he realizes that Clint has to be back at school, and then he starts to wonder if she’s gone to spend her time with him instead, with someone who doesn’t _mind_ having a dog in their bed.

And underneath everything, Steve knows it’s not really about the dog, but he likes Natasha, and he’s attracted to Natasha, and he doesn’t want to lose Natasha, and the whole thing is more confusing than he’ll admit to.

They manage to avoid each other at school, which isn’t hard considering Natasha never goes to class and Steve takes a majority of different subjects, and he doesn’t actually see her again until they end up at their usual campus bar after a long week. He ends up standing behind her as she orders a drink, absolutely unmistakable with her hair and tattoos and stance even in the dim light and the overwhelming crowds.

“Hey,” he says, touching her shoulder lightly, letting his fingers rest on the top of the serpent’s tongue. She flinches and spins around, something feral in her gaze, as if she means to retaliate, and Steve suddenly realizes that given their surroundings it’s probably the wrong way to attract her attention. Her posture relaxes, though, as soon as she meets his eyes, and Steve finds himself feeling a little relieved that at least if she’s mad, she’s not _that_ kind of mad.

“Hey,” she says cautiously, surprising him as she leans in for a hug, and he can smell the faint scent of ash in her hair.

“Hey,” he repeats awkwardly, wrapping his arms around her loosely before she pulls away. “Long week?”

“You could say that,” she responds as two beers appear in front of her, and Steve doesn’t have to wonder who the other is for. He sighs.

“I wanted to apologize.”

“For kicking me out?” Natasha asks icily, picking up her drinks. She shoves the other one into his hand, surprising him for the second time in less than a minute.

“I thought that was for Barton.”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “It was, but he can get his own drink. I think I left him by the dart board.” She turns, all but motioning for him to follow even though she doesn’t say it, and he walks behind her as she leads him away from the bar. It’s easier for her to slip between the crowds with the ease of a small insect, harder for Steve who is built big and bulky, not small-boned and delicate underneath a canvas of hardened skin that gives the impression she’s anything but.

“How’s the dog?” Steve asks hesitantly once they’ve pressed themselves against a space of wall near the bathroom, where it’s a little easier to hear over the loud yells and the remixes of the jukebox. Natasha shrugs.

“Fine. Clint took him back when he came home.”

“That’s good,” Steve replies slowly, and Natasha looks exasperated.

“Please tell me what we’re doing.”

“I thought that was your job.”

“What?” Natasha gives him a blank stare and Steve shrugs, taking a drink.

“We’re a thing, right? You told me that means we’re together and we fuck, and we’re a thing.”

“Yes.” The blank stare has turned into something that he thinks might be amusement, and Steve suddenly considers that he can probably fuck her or prod her all he wants, but he’ll never actually understand how she works, and maybe, unlike other girls he’s known or dated, that’s what she _wants_.

Maybe she wants to be a mystery, someone that you have to constantly pull apart the pieces of to find the actual truth underneath.

And maybe he wants to work to find that out, even if he knows there’s a chance he never will.

“I want to be a thing,” Steve decides, cringing at the lameness of his words, but Natasha just smiles.

“I do too,” she says, rocking forward on her heels to kiss him, the tanginess of her breath hot against his neck. She pulls away, wrapping their hands together. “Come play some darts.”

Steve’s a little hesitant at first, but if Clint’s been aware of the situation or if he’s got his own feelings about what’s going on, he doesn’t seem to care, just hands Steve a handful of darts and boasts that he can shoot two at once and still get a perfect score, and Steve finds himself realizing he really _has_ missed whatever this fucked up situation is between them.

“You know, that threesome offer still stands,” Natasha whispers in his ear sometime later, her throaty voice tickling his skin, and he feels his hands go clammy, swallowing down an emotion he can’t figure out. She leans into him as Clint throws another dart, and Steve nods.

“Maybe some other time.”

 

***

 

It never really happens – the threesome, that is. (The closest that they come is one drunken night when Natasha gets both of them naked in bed, but neither one of the boys has a condom on them, and so that’s the end of that.) But for all the annoyance that Steve had initially felt given where their biggest fight came from, he realizes that it seems to have opened up some sort of gap between them that makes understanding each other a little easier. The weeks pass in long hours and short bursts of minutes, with Steve and Natasha spending most of their time together or at class or at the bar, or with Clint behind one of the old abandoned buildings where him and Natasha routinely cut class.

“I’m thinking of going to Vegas with Clint,” she says, even though they haven’t actually discussed their spring break plans yet. It’s a week before midterms and they’re lying together in bed with their heads on each other’s shoulders and scalps, and Natasha is letting her fingers run over his collarbone.

“Vegas?” Steve asks curiously, and Natasha nods.

“Yes, well. We’ve both wanted to visit there for a long time.”

Steve shifts slightly in bed. “That’ll be fun,” he says, because he knows it will be. For all that he wants to travel, he can’t really imagine himself in Vegas, but he knows she’ll fit in and have more fun more than he ever would.

“So you’re okay with that?” Natasha asks quizzically, and Steve nods again.

“Yeah,” he answers, and as he says the words, he realizes he’s not lying. “I am.”

“Oh.” Natasha seems puzzled, as if she’s thought he might make a bigger deal about her going off on spring break with the guy who technically wasn’t her boyfriend, and Steve feels her hand start to stroke his cock again. “Well, good.”

She kisses him and wraps her legs around his own, and he doesn’t really remember much of their conversation after that.

 

***

 

One week later, he waits outside his house, helping Natasha load the last of her luggage into a waiting cab.

“I’ll call when I get there,” she says, waving her phone. “Don’t get a tattoo.”

He laughs and presses a kiss to his cheek. “Don’t get married.”

She grins, pulling away and shaking his hand roughly.

“Deal.”

So she goes to Vegas with Clint, and Steve goes to Cancun with Bucky, and they promise to reunite in a week when they return from spring break with what, in Natasha’s words, will probably be “a fuckton of stories no one should ever be allowed to hear.”

And Steve’s okay with letting her go off without him, and he’s also pretty confident everything will be fine. _After all_ , he thinks as he boards his plane, handing off his ticket to the agent, thinking of the way Natasha had looked at him before he left, _what can go wrong_?

 

 

**Clint Barton**

Clint Barton is not a planner. In fact, Clint can’t remember having ever planned anything in his life, except maybe a surprise party for his brother when he was little. He supposes that’s the reason Natasha looks at him like he has ten heads when halfway through their flight to Vegas, he passes over a small notebook.

“What the fuck is this?” Natasha asks, taking it from his hands and opening it up. Clint grins.

“Our itinerary.”

“You’ve _got_ to be kidding me,” Natasha says, staring down at the chicken scrawl that Clint knows (unfortunately) passes for his own handwriting. “You don’t plan things. Hell, you don’t even go to class.”

“Neither do you,” Clint counters, leaning over the seat. “Anyway, we also never go on vacation to some place we’ve both wanted to visit. Look, I made sure we’re going to hit all the popular casinos – including the one with the ice bar, because that’s supposed to be cool – and then I found the place that’s showing Cirque du Soleil. The acts are supposed to be fucking _awesome_.”

Natasha nods and moves her stewardess-issued coke on the tray table, taking out a small bottle of vodka from inside her purse and shaking it in.

“You excited to go to Vegas?” Clint asks with a small grin, and Natasha takes a drink before offering him her cup.

“You excited to see high flying circus acts in the drunkest place in the world?”

“Fuck yes,” Clint answers with a bigger smile. “You excited to get another tattoo?”

Natasha leans her head back against the seat. “Vegas is going to be great,” she decides, lacing their fingers together, and Clint leans his head into her shoulder almost without thinking about it.

“Yeah. Yeah, it will be.”

 

***

 

Clint knows that him and Natasha aren’t really _together_. And he’s okay with that.

He had met Natasha the first day of school, in so much as “meet” could be classified as watching her walk into class, and then watching her promptly walk out. It hadn’t taken long for him to do the same, casually following from a few steps away, until she had turned around and stopped him in his tracks with a gaze that included a brow raised better than he thinks he could ever make an arrow arc.

“Why are you following me?”

Her voice had been ice but her eyes had been more curious, less deathly than her tone implied, and he wasn’t sure why he noticed it at the time, but it had caused him to react almost out of instinct.

“Because I think you’re pretty cute.”

He had thought she was going to walk away after that but she didn’t, instead, had looked at him with a thoughtful gaze and then walked forward purposefully and shoved her lips onto his mouth. Clint had been caught so off guard that he hadn’t even had a chance to think about how he wanted to respond, other than the only natural way anyone that has had a girl surprisingly kiss them _should_ respond.

“Talk to me about your tattoos,” she had said after pulling away, running her hand over his back, pulling down the side of his shirt to reveal some aggressive markings on his skin. “Besides, you don’t want to go to class either, right?”

“No,” Clint had admitted, and Natasha had grinned, and he had told her about his first tattoo, then his second and then his third, and he shared his clove cigarettes as she explained the story behind her own ink. They slept together that night without really sleeping together at all, finding that they fit comfortably into each other’s bodies in a way that seemed like it was destiny, like they’d found the other half of themselves that they had been searching for without knowing it.

So Clint knows their relationship is different than whatever she has with Steve, which is something that centers itself more on physical contact and a verbal need to always be on the same page. Clint doesn’t even think he wants a girlfriend, and doesn’t think of Natasha in that way, but also knows and has known from their first meeting that he trusts her more than he’s trusted anyone in his life. In that sense, he thinks he loves her, but he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to tell her that…at least, not the way he wants to.

“What are you thinking about?” Natasha asks quietly, her voice jagged in places where sleep has worn it out, and his eyes are closed but he smiles anyway, indicating that he knows he’s heard her.

“The first day we met.”

He hears Natasha move beside him, shifting from her slump against the window until her fingers are curled around his arm.

“You know that I don’t believe in destiny.”

“Me neither,” Clint admits, opening his eyes. “But we found each other, didn’t we?”

Natasha shrugs. “You pursued me, you thought I was hot,” she reminds him as Clint makes a face.

“You were hot. You are hot,” he corrects, stumbling over his words and Natasha grins as the flight attendant announces their descent into McCarran International Airport, and Clint re-fastens his seatbelt.

“Hey, think they have slot machines in the airport?”

“If they do, we’re playing one before we leave,” Natasha decides, moving her fingers to his hand and squeezing it once.

“Let’s do Vegas, Barton.”

 

***

 

There are indeed slot machines in the airport, and Natasha picks the one with the most bells and whistles, ignoring Clint’s initial complaint that she’s throwing away twenty dollars that could be spent on more important things. She only wins back ten of the twenty she uses, but Clint thinks he would allow her to play all the slot machines she wanted if it meant he got to see her like this, laughing and more brash than usual, seemingly happy, as if all her other troubles didn’t exist anymore.

It’s the first time they’ve been together while being truly on their own, because even when they were skipping class, away from teachers and students and friends, they were still caught in the constraints of the school atmosphere. Clint watches as she sorts out the keys to their hotel room, smooth talking the man behind the desk at the hotel with walls slanted in pyramid formation, and finds himself marveling at the way she carries herself. It’s altogether a different manner than what she usually displays, as if she’s morphed into a different person entirely – different tone, different mannerisms, but underneath, so far as Clint can ascertain, still Natasha, still the same Natasha that kissed him on the first day of school, that shares his cigarettes when no one’s looking, that can understand him with one simple look.

“Holy shit,” Clint mutters as they walk into their room, Natasha dropping the bags on the bed.

“Not bad for last minute booking,” she muses, throwing the shades open. The room faces the street, buildings and cars stretching down the boardwalk, and although it’s the middle of the day, the glitz and glamour seem to ooze from between the walls of the city like there’s no escape from the magic that coats the surroundings.

Clint turns around, and almost immediately, is met with Natasha’s lips. The kiss isn’t rough, though -- not like any other time he’s known Natasha to put her mouth on him, accidental or not. Instead, it’s dainty and gentle and almost a little shy.

“I just wanted to say I kissed someone in Vegas,” she says quietly as she pulls away, before starting to unpack her clothes.

 

***

 

She calls Steve while he washes up in the bathroom, and he hears bits and pieces of her conversation through the thin walls in between running water from the faucet.

“Seriously, this is your own fault…well, yes, I would’ve dragged you out…oh come on, Rogers, don’t be a dumbass…yeah, we’re good. You too.”

She throws the phone onto the bed as he walks into the room, wiping his hands with a small face towel.

“Telling all my secrets?” he asks sarcastically as Natasha sits down on the bed.

“Him and Bucky apparently got stranded at the airport,” she says, ignoring his comment. “Flight was delayed three hours, they had to get on and then _off_ the plane, and apparently they ended up in a bar to kill time. And then missed the re-boarding, so they’re just leaving now.” She sighs. “I told him I would’ve dragged him out of the bar myself.”

“Or you would’ve been joining the mile high club while still on the ground,” Clint offers, pulling on a pair of jeans. Natasha tilts her head, pursing her lips.

“Yeah, probably. You know me too well, Barton.”

Clint shakes his head. “No kidding.”

They start out at the hotel bar, and after a few drinks, wander down the boardwalk looking for a place that might pass as a suitable establishment for dinner. Clint grouses about the sky-high prices while Natasha ignores his whining, pulling him through the crowd and stopping occasionally to point out the yard long drinks that people carry around in colorful neon canisters.

“We’re definitely getting one of those later,” she decides as she pulls him into one of the next bars. Clint groans.

“Christ, I’m not gonna be able to walk straight,” he mutters. Natasha rolls her eyes.

“Isn’t that the point of Vegas?” she asks, plunking down a few bills on the table and calling the bartender over. Clint laughs.

“Yeah. I guess. But I _did_ want to be a little bit sober at some point. You know, to actually be aware of the things we did. Cross some of those items off that list.”

“Hmmmm.” Natasha grabs two drinks and finagles her way easily through a crowd of people until she’s pushed him into a slightly less crowded corner. She places a hand on his shoulder as she passes off her glass, closing her lips around the straw while letting them curve into a grin. “My instincts tell me that you’re totally, completely aware right now, Clint Barton.”

He actually really is, so he decides not to press the conversation further, and lets her lean against him with her head nestled under his chin as they both down their drinks. He also decides he wants to see the Cirque du Soleil act that particular night, the same night that they end up at the bar for five hours straight, but Natasha convinces him to wait at least until the next day.

“Besides,” she says for the thousandth time, as she pushes him into the room. “You want to enjoy it, and you won’t if you can’t see straight. Plus, the last thing I want to be responsible for is you trying to drunkenly climb onto the roof and shoot some arrows into a couple of tourists.”

“But that’s the fun of it,” he whines, knowing he’s being just as annoying as he can be without her wanting to slap him. “Not the shooting people, I mean. Enjoying it.”

Natasha makes a face at his words. “God, Vegas is turning you into an annoying brat,” she says but there’s a slight smile on her lips as she shoves him down onto the bed.

 

***

 

24 hours later, Clint is loathe to admit to Natasha that he’s glad he waited to enjoy the show, because there’s something truly, wonderfully magical about the whole performance that he knows he probably would have missed if he wasn’t sober.

The portion of Clint’s life that he spent in the circus was something he didn’t routinely talk about, minus the parts about the bruises and broken bones and tattoos. Natasha knew some of it, what he had decided to share in moments that they both got a little slap-happy about the pasts they tried to hide from the world, but Clint’s still trying to work his way up to telling her the _real_ stories, the ones that include the moments that he still has trouble articulating.

The dizzying array of twists and flips and flying render him speechless and in between applause, he hears Natasha’s breathing increase next to him, the sharp intake of air as one of the performers throws himself from the trapeze-like rings. It’s not entirely easy to impress Natasha, he knows, less easy to do anything that lets her lower her guard in the way that he knows she’s able to do with him, and as he watches the two performers meet in the middle of the stage, entwined in each other’s bodies, he finds himself reaching for her hand, his fingers creeping into her own.

Out of the corner of her eye, he sees her glance down, but she doesn’t move, and neither does he. They spend the rest of the show in silence, frozen in each other’s grip, and when they untangle themselves to offer applause Clint feels her eyes on his form.

Afterwards, they find a rooftop bar a few casinos down the boardwalk, and sip their drinks while the unusually cool April winds drift over their bodies, raising goosebumps along their exposed skin.

“Goddamn, would you look at those lights,” Clint says, staring up at one of the casinos as Natasha leans into his shoulder.

“Yeah. Vegas is pretty fucking incredible.”

 

***

 

On the third day, Natasha decides to get another tattoo.

“That’s…strange,” Clint says, leaning back on his elbows as he shifts on the lounge chair, pushing his sunglasses up onto his head as she angles her wrist forward. She’d come back from her appointment and rudely awakened him from his poolside nap by throwing her towel onto his face, then promptly shoved the newly bandaged skin under his nose.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” she says, re-bandaging her arm after withdrawing it from his view. Clint sighs.

“I mean, of all things. An hourglass?”

“What the fuck is wrong with an hourglass?”

“Nothing,” Clint says slowly, closing his eyes again. “It’s just…you know, I thought you’d get something a little flashier.”

“Maybe I didn’t want anything flashier. Maybe I like it,” Natasha replies defensively. “Reminds me of the fact that we don’t get a lot of time in this world.”

“There’s an optimistic thought,” Clint mutters, turning onto his side. He feels pressure on his legs and then increasing heaviness as Natasha sits on his knees.

“Ow – fucking hell – what are you doing?”

“I’m bored,” Natasha says, throwing her arm over his bare chest, letting her fingers settle on the scars there. “When are you getting your next tattoo, Hawkeye?”

“Are we back to that again?” Clint asks, grunting as he tries to move under her weight. After they had left the performance the previous night – specifically, during drink number four on the roof -- they had started to come up with ridiculous sounding nicknames for each other. She had picked Hawkeye, because of his bird tattoos and his sharp senses, and in return, he had picked Black Widow.

“I remind you of a deadly spider, then?” Natasha had asked dryly, but he hadn’t missed the slight hint of amusement in her voice.

“Nah. Only when you’re angry,” Clint had responded with a grin. He credits that conversation to the fact that their sex that night was better than he had ever experienced no matter how many random times they’d slept together, Natasha thrusting into him with all the force of someone who knew what she wanted and how to get it, Clint’s hands leaving marks around her waist and her back, both of them still sore in the morning and covered in each other’s bruises.

 

***

 

Clint gets his tattoo the next day and Natasha offers to come with him, but he waves her off after coffee that he knows is definitely more Baileys than it is actual caffeine.

“And how will I know where to find you?” Natasha asks, folding her arms. Clint smiles.

“I’ll be waiting by the ice bar in The Mandalay. It’ll be a good way to spend one of our last days here.”

Natasha looks skeptical but heads off on her own while Clint goes back to the room and gets dressed, heading towards the tattoo parlor at the end of the strip that he had scouted out a few days ago, the one situated just past the _“Welcome to Las Vegas_ ” sign. When he enters, he’s surprised to find that the artist already preparing his tools, and even more surprised to find Natasha leaning on the counter, twisting a strand of hair around her fingers.

“I thought you already got a tattoo,” he says, unable to help the smile he feels creeping across his face. Natasha shrugs.

“And if you thought I was letting you go through yours alone, you’re insane,” she says. “You think I don’t remember your stories?”

Clint hesitates and then nods, because he does, and he had forgotten, even, the things he had told her about his first few experiences on the road, how despite his tolerance for pain sometimes the needles hurt as much as they also helped him to forget the aggression and damage he had suffered in his past.

She holds his hand loosely in a form of solidarity and talks about things he already knows, things about her past and about what she does and doesn’t like about school, she talks about Steve and she talks about him, and when he’s done and bandaged up and walking out the door, she finally asks the question he’s surprised took so long to come to fruition, considering their penchant of being open and honest and not beating around the bush.

“So you gonna tell me who that arrow is for?” Natasha looks down at his wrist where the white gauze stands out starkly against otherwise tan skin, and Clint glances at her, smiling slightly.

“You,” he says, lacing their hands together as they move down the boardwalk.

 

***

 

Clint drinks, but he doesn’t really get hangovers.

Once or twice, he’ll wake up with a headache that lasts the whole day – sometimes he can’t sleep because he’s drank too much the night before, and sometimes he just needs to down an entire water bottle when he wakes up. But as far as actual, porcelain-bowl-hugging hangovers go, Clint’s usually pretty good.

His nausea wakes him up before the rest of his body does and he flings the covers off, stumbling uncoordinatedly to the bathroom and emptying the contents of his stomach into the toilet. While he concentrates on getting his breath back, he tries to congratulate himself that he at least spared the maid the annoyance of cleaning up the mess elsewhere.

He lets himself sit a few moments longer, resting his head on the cold ceramic before he figures he should try to pull himself together and make sure Natasha’s okay. (Though at this point, he thinks he might be more worried that she’ll wake up before he can move and find him here, stretched out like a pathetic frat boy on the bathroom floor, something that she would never let him live down.) Clint drags himself to somewhat of a sitting position and as he uses his hands to push himself upright, he catches a glance of something silver glinting in the overhead light.

He stops, stares, and then closes his eyes as the room spins before opening them again, because this _has_ to be a dream, he thinks, it has to be some sort of strange twisted dream, the kind of dream that came from spending three days alone with Natasha. And if this _was_ some sort of dream, then maybe he could be lucky enough to not actually be so hungover, and maybe the ring on his finger wasn’t real, and maybe he wasn’t really responsible for something that was potentially dumb…

Clint closes his eyes again, swallowing down another wave of sickness that he knows has nothing to do with alcohol and opens them to see the ring still there, still shining prominently on his finger.

Only one way to be sure, then.

Taking a deep breath, he closes the fingers of one hand into a fist, ramming it into the side of the toilet bowl. Pain radiates through his knuckles as he lets out a yelp, immediately pulling back and rubbing his throbbing skin, biting down on his tongue so hard that he tastes blood.

Nope. Definitely real. Definitely married.

 _Definitely_ fucked, and not in the way most people would be after finding a ring on their finger.

He gets up and pushes open the bathroom door, not surprised in the least to find Natasha stirring in bed, her hair half-hidden by the pillow she’s stolen from his side of the mattress.

“I heard a crash,” Natasha says hoarsely in a voice muffled by the covers, thick with sleep and what sounds like the after-effects of too much drinking. Clint slowly makes his way across the room, crawling next to her when he finally gets close enough.

“That was me,” he says, not really knowing where he should start, or how he should start. Natasha makes a noise and turns over again, and that’s when Clint notices the small matching band on her own ring finger. He frowns.

“Hey, Nat?”

“Mmmm.” There are possibly words hidden in her response, but he can’t make them out, and figures it doesn’t really matter.

“Were we really drunk last night?”

“Define really drunk,” Natasha says a little more clearly, rolling back over. He meets her half-lidded eyes and watches as she stares at him silently, before her gaze narrows and her pupils become less foggy and more alert, and he can almost see her brain working to become more coherent as she reads between the lines of what he knows is written on his face.

“Clint. What’s up?”

“It’s, uh…” He reaches up to rub his neck without thinking and only realizes what he’s done when Natasha’s eyes widen even further, her jaw going a little slack.

“ _What the actual fuck_?”

He startles as she bolts upright in bed, and if it was any other occasion he thinks it would be an instance to tease her about until the end of time – Natasha half naked with no make-up, hair sticking up in places it normally wouldn’t. Clint swallows.

“Did we…”

“Yeah,” Clint says slowly, nodding to her hand. “Pretty sure we did.”

“Oh, fuck,” Natasha breathes, shaking her head, and Clint wonders how she has the ability to do so since moving his _own_ head for even five inches makes him feel like his brain is going to explode. “How?”

Clint snorts, pulling up the covers. “How? I’m guessing a priest, a chapel and some rings. And a lot of drinks,” he adds sarcastically while Natasha shoots him a death glare.

“No shit, Sherlock. I mean how…how do neither of us remember this?”

Clint sighs. “I don’t know,” he admits truthfully, because he has no idea. Were they both really that out of it that she could have asked him to marry her outright, and he would’ve say yes? Or was it the other way around? Clint hates to admit that it bothers him not to know the specifics of how this whole thing happened.

“Shit, I asked you,” Natasha says suddenly, and Clint looks up, furrowing his brow.

“What?”

“I asked you,” Natasha repeats, looking a little embarrassed. “Uh, at dinner? I think? You were talking about how we met again, because apparently you like to tell that story about a thousand times, and I said something like _if you like me so much, why don’t you just ask me to marry you?_ And then, uh…I guess you did. At some point after that.”

“I didn’t mean it literally,” Clint grumbles, and Natasha rolls her eyes.

“What, you want your ring back?”

“No,” he answers just as quickly, seeing the look on her face. “No, I…I don’t know,” he continues helplessly, trying to find words that make sense. “We’re not really a thing, Nat. We’re just…us.”

Natasha looks confused. “I thought you liked us.”

“I do,” Clint replies in frustration. “So if we stay married, will that change?”

“ _Will_ it?”

Clint feels his head start to pound again and Natasha shrugs, reaching for her pants, which have fallen somewhere under the bed.

“I mean, I’ll still tell you all my secrets. You’ll still know me better than anyone I’ve ever met.” She straightens up with a grin. “I’ll still bone Rogers when I want to, and I’ll still take care of your dog, even if he hates that.”

“Fabulous,” Clint mutters but he can’t help in sharing Natasha’s small smile. “I guess we’re really married, then?”

“Considering I don’t want to really deal with tracking down any kind of embarrassing trail of paperwork, I guess we really are,” Natasha responds, as if it’s that easy, just a simple mistake and one drunken night later and he’s married to someone who he considers his best friend, who still happens to be dating one of their _other_ best friends. They lapse into silence while Clint tries to focus on the ridiculousness of it all, startled out of his thoughts by the sound of raucous amusement, Natasha shaking beside him as she tries to control herself.

“Natasha?”

There’s no response, just more laughter, and Clint grabs for a pillow, throwing it at her face.

“ _Natasha_.”

“I promised Rogers I wouldn’t get married,” Natasha says when she can catch her breath, before dissolving into another bout of giggles, and the sound is so infectious that Clint can’t help but join her.

“Oh, man.” He flips over onto his back, ignoring the spinning room, and tries to sober himself with little success. When he turns his head back, he catches the mischievous glint in her eyes.

“Yeah. Rogers is going to flip a shit.”

 

 

“…so like I said. That’s what happened in Vegas,” Clint finishes as he plays with the ring on his finger, and Natasha finally speaks up, grabbing her drink.

“You know this doesn’t change anything.”

Steve continues to stare, his gaze shifting from one of their faces to the other, before closing his mouth. “So you’re saying that we’re still a…we’re still a _thing_ …even though you and Barton are…”

“Even though we’re married, yes,” Natasha finishes impatiently, as if she doesn’t know why this is such a hard concept for him to grasp. She throws Clint a look and Steve rubs a hand over his face and then laughs once.

“What the hell. This relationship was never going to be monogamous anyway.” He tosses back his drink with one long gulp and Clint raises an eyebrow.

“Y’know, Rogers.” He leans forward on the table. “Now that we’re legal, maybe we can finally have that threesome at some point.”

Steve catches the other man’s gaze and feels Natasha’s hand curl into his, watching as she rubs her elbow against Clint’s own, and he smiles.

“Don’t count on it, Barton.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments/kudos are appreciated!


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